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Monday, October 1, 2012

The Orioles clinched a playoff birth on Sunday. The Orioles. Not only did they clinch a playoff birth, the Orioles are tied for first with the Yankees in the AL East. The Orioles. The team that finished last in the East just a year ago by losing 93 games. The Orioles. A team with a rotation built around Joe Saunders, bandaids, Wei-Yin Chen, a catapult made from Legos and praying for rain. The Orioles. The team that employs and starts two players with career strikeout rates over 30% (Chris Davis and Mark Reynolds).

Davis is having his best season and his second with a positive Wins Above Replacement. He's been crushing it in September hitting .337/.419/.652 with eight home runs including five in his last four games. But it wasn't Davis' smoking hot streak that caused the fire on the Orioles charter plane forcing an emergency landing.

In what I assume was a team-building exercise, manager extraordinaire Buck Showalter was responsible for the kitchen fire and the unscheduled trip to the Jacksonville airport en route to St. Petersburg. I hope they got to use the inflatable slide. Maybe it wasn't technically Showalter's fault but he is taking the blame...

“I didn’t get my coffee so I am a little ornery," he said. "You all know how I am when I don’t get a cup of coffee. They were getting ready to heat up coffee, that’s what happened. So it’s my fault.”

To recap, the Orioles are somehow in the playoffs and do not heat up a tin foil bowl of coffee in the plane's microwave.